1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to monitoring systems in general and more particularly to performance visualization in consolidating virtual machines in a virtualized data center.
2. Description of the Related Art
Monitoring systems detect and respond to operational problems, oftentimes before the end user becomes aware of those problems. Consequently, monitoring systems have become a common requirement, especially for revenue-generating production environments. Most administrators understand the need for monitoring systems. Infrastructure teams, in fact, typically monitor the basic health of application servers by keeping an eye on central processing unit (CPU) utilization, throughput, memory usage and the like. However, there are many parts to an application server environment, and understanding which metrics to monitor for each of these pieces differentiates the environments that can effectively anticipate production problems from those that might get overwhelmed by them.
When applied in an appropriate context, systems monitoring is more than just the data that shows how an enterprise system performs technically. Load balancing metrics such as CPU utilization, method response times and power consumption can be inspected to determine when one server has been overly taxed while another inefficiently underutilized. Load metrics analysis can be even more important given the advent of the virtualized data center.
The traditional data center includes a multiplicity of server computers coupled to one another communicatively over a computer communications network. Applications execute in the different server computers. Applications further can execute redundantly in the server computers in a load-balanced arrangement with a sprayer directing requests to different ones of the redundant server computers. Data center managers through systems monitoring monitor the load metrics on a given server computer to perform rebalancing of the different server computers. By comparison, in a virtualized data center, multiple virtual servers co-exist in a single server computer. Optionally, different server computers each can host one or more virtual servers. Through such an arrangement, tremendous reductions in total cost of ownership of a data center have been achieved. Other advantages include the ability to persist the state of an entire virtual server in disk storage for transportability in batch or real time to a different server computer. Consequently, server migration and server failover can be achieved with ease.
Monitoring systems for virtualized data centers have proven to be less effective than when applied to a traditional data center of different server computers. In this regard, while monitoring systems for traditional data centers measure the performance of a server computer in terms of load metrics experienced through the execution of one or more applications therein, in a virtualized environment a clear correlation between executing applications and the underlying load metrics cannot be established due to the intermediary virtual machines. Yet, monitoring systems can in fact monitor load metrics for a virtual machine. However, in the virtualized environment, a prospective rebalancing of virtual machines in different server computers cannot be readily visualized when considering a consolidation of different virtual machines in a single server computer.